I stopped scraping Instagram myself — now profile lookups cost me $0.10 per 1K

Elijah — Thu, 08 Oct 2026 04:39:47 +0000

Scraping Instagram yourself is a special kind of pain. Residential proxies at $80–300/mo. Sessions that die overnight. Selectors that break every time Meta ships a frontend change. And 5–15 hours a month of maintenance nobody puts on the invoice.

I ran the math the way nobody wants to: DIY isn't the proxy bill, it's proxy bill + infra + your time + the week it silently breaks. At that point even $1/1K-request APIs start looking reasonable.

So I built the boring alternative: a single-purpose Instagram profile API on RapidAPI. One endpoint — profile by username — returning clean, structured JSON. No sessions to manage, no proxies to rotate, no scraper to babysit.

The part I'm actually proud of is the pricing. Pro is $49.99/mo for 500K requests, which works out to about $0.10 per 1K lookups. For comparison, Apify charges $1.50–$2.70 per 1K results and Bright Data is $1.50 per 1K records. If you're doing bulk profile enrichment — lead lists, influencer vetting, dashboards, research datasets — that's a 10–15x difference that compounds fast.

There's a free tier (100 requests/month, hard limit, no card games) so you can verify the schema fits your pipeline before paying anything.

Who it's for: anyone enriching Instagram usernames at scale who doesn't want to own scraping infrastructure. Who it's not for: if you need comments, hashtags, or logged-in actions, this isn't that — yet. Profile data is the whole product right now, and I'd rather be honest about scope than vague.

Roadmap is driven by requests: posts, Reels, and followers endpoints are the most asked-for. Tell me which you'd actually pay for and I'll build in that order.

DEV Community: Elijah

I stopped scraping Instagram myself — now profile lookups cost me $0.10 per 1K

Link in the first comment. Happy to answer anything — especially the skeptical questions.